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Tina Minoru

Another character from Doctor Strange (I’ll add the other two as soon as I find the images): Tina Minoru, portrayed by Linda Louise Duan. She’s another one of the Masters of the Mystic Arts, and she appears briefly in a couple of sequences. It’s safe to say that most of her scenes got cut out, since we see more of her in the trailers than in the actual movie, but she can be spotted in Hong Kong, when Wong organizes the defense of the sanctuary against the Zealots, and she’s seen choosing a very familiar weapon to battle the evil sorcerers, the Staff of One, which will be the trademark tool of her more famous and popular daughter. In the comics, Tina never had anything to do with Kamar Taj, albeit she’s a magic user… but quite a bad one, actually. Let’s see together.

Tina was a perfectly normal woman, who lived a perfectly normal life with her fiancé Robert Minoru: both Americans of Japanese descent, they lived in Los Angeles, California. Tina had a lot of friends, enjoyed watching Oprah Winfrey, was a devout Catholic and a faithful fiancée, nothing was out of place… at least apparently. Behind the normality’s facade, Tina hid a secret, as she was a practitioner of the dark arts, a sorceress who mastered a number of powerful and complex spells… and this was a “passion” she shared with Robert. They both sought unlimited power, aiming to disclose the secrets of the multiverse, and they found out they strengthened each other’s proficiency and strength. Eventually, Tina and Robert got married, but during their wedding day something utterly unexpected happened: the moment they exchanged rings, they vanished, teleported underwater, to a secret and ancient temple known as the Vivarium. Along with them, other five newlywed couples had been summoned: Catherine and Geoffrey Wilder, Staceyand Dale Yorkes, Aliceand Gene Hayes, Janet and Victor Stein and Leslieand Frank Dean. As soon as they found themselves in the Vivarium together, the prisoners started accusing each other, and pretty soon they all started to use superhuman powers one against the other: they were all super criminals. Tina and Robert together created a dark portal aimed to kill the Hayes (who were actually mutants), but the battle was stopped by the ones who had summoned them all for first: the Gibborim, three interdimensional giants, elder gods who had been exiled from Earth eons before. The Gibborim wanted to return to Earth realm, and to destroy it, but they needed the help of selected couples with particular skills (the Minorus were The Magicians): in exchange for their help, the summoned criminals were promised absolute power over L.A., and eternal life to survive the upcoming apocalypse; in exchange, they would have made a blood sacrifice a year for twenty-five years, allowing the gods to return. As well as all the others, Tina and Robert accepted the offer, and they founded The Pride.

The pact worked out pretty well, and Tina and her husband found out their magic powers had been drastically increased; respect to her husband, Tina also wielded the Staff of One, a powerful relic (so powerful that even the Dreaded Dormammutrembled at its sight) able to perform any kind of feat responding to a simple vocal command, with the sole limitation of allowing the same command to be said only once. Using their combined magic powers, The Magicians of The Pride performed the Ritual of Blood every year, sacrificing a soul to the Gibborim to restore their power and weaken the barrier between dimensions, and in the meanwhile they enjoyed the gifts they’d been granted. When the Steins (evil scientists who served as The Wise Men) announced that they would have had a child, and that they wanted eternal life to be granted to him, the Minorus decided to do the same, and they conceived a daughter, Nico. Tina and Robert raised their daughter as a normal kid, never making her part of who they truly were, and when Nico entered a goth phase as a teenager, the Minorus did whatever they could to keep her out of it, believing it would have led her to tap into magic. When Nico and the other children of the Pride were teenagers, the families reunited for the usual Ritual of Blood, and this time they had captured a young prostitute. While Tina and the others performed the ritual, slaying the girl to let her soul be devoured by the Gibborim, a scream was heard, and the Pride feared that their children might have witnessed the murder… but the kids were just playing Twister, and the scream was part of the game… apparently. Soon after, Nico Minoru and all the others ran away from home, and started foiling their parents’ project of destroying the world. Tina faced Nico one night in the Steins’ house, and in an attempt to stop her, she stabbed her daughter with the Staff of One… but the girl’s body absorbed it, as the Staff had chosen her as its new master. Now without her main weapon, Tina Minoru still had plenty of power to prevent her daughter from foiling a vicennial plan that would have granted immortality to her family…

Tina Minoru is an ambitious and power-hungry woman, who follows the Dark Path in the effort of discovering forbidden truth and obtaining immense power. Trained by the witch Marie LaVeau, Tina is a powerful sorceress: with the Staff of One in her possession, she was capable of pretty much everything, but even without it her proficiency in dark magic is remarkable, and she can perform a variety of spells, from creating matter out of thin air to teleportation, from summoning demons to energy manipulation; when she sums her magic energy to her husband’s, they reach a formidable level of power, high enough even to repel mystic beings such as Elder Gods (even if briefly). One of the most powerful magic users in North America, Tina Minoru is one of the pillars of The Pride, a mother ready to let the entire world burn to assure her only daughter eternal life.

[…] them as an amateur, mostly through an old book inherited by his grandfather. He was engaged to Tina, who had Minoru blood in her veins as well, and practiced what little spells she could with him; […]

[…] Dale had particular difficulties in liking the others; they took a special grudge with Robert and Tina Minoru, remembering what their daughter did (would have done) to them. When one of them, Janet Stein, got […]

[…] learn that Nico Minoru tried to call an ambulance for her suicidal (?) sister Amy, but her mother Tina prevented her from doing it, and she called a police detective she knew to cover everything up. The […]

[…] by Carmen Serano. In Runaways, the Hernandezes have been dead for a while, possibly murdered by Tina Minoru, but we got to see them in a flashback picturing the first Blood Rite of The Pride, an experience […]